What Were The Lamanites Thinking?

Considering that, at first glance, the Lamanites' motivations don't seem to make any sense, I've been trying to figure out what might have been going through their heads.

In Alma 24, we're told, twice, what might have been their primary motivation for going against the Anti-Nephi-Lehies, and it wasn't because they disagreed with their new religious beliefs. The idea of hatred is brought up several times, and it's usually hard to rationalize or justify hatred, but in this case, it's not too hard to understand the actions that their supposed hatred was causing them to take.

And it came to pass that their brethren, the Lamanites, made preparations for war, and came up to the land of Nephi for the purpose of destroying the king, and to place another in his stead, and also of destroying the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi out of the land.

Alma 24:20

I think I mentioned yesterday that the violence is probably the only way to remove an unwanted monarch who doesn't voluntarily step down. If the king of the Lamanites didn't step down, he would have to be taken down, and the Lamanites expected to have to fight through his army to get to him.

It must have been very surprising and confusing to the Lamanites when the Anti-Nephi-Lehies didn't fight back. The Lamanites had gained a lot of experience with war, and the enemy usually didn't do things like this. Sure, they might surrender, but usually then they plead for their lives. The Anti-Nephi-Lehies all reacted to the approach of the Lamanite army by kneeling down and preparing to die. Odds are, that shook the Lamanites up a little bit. Some of them even began to question what they were doing and gave up the fight.

At this point, I'm not entirely sure why the Lamanites didn't push forward to accomplish their objective. Maybe, when they met with no resistance, enough of the attacking Lamanites gave up the fight that the remaining Lamanites decided that they no longer had the manpower they needed to storm the palace. Maybe they thought this was some kind of trick and they were being lured into an ambush. Leaving potentially hostile forces behind you as you march deeper into enemy territory is horrible military planning. If they had let the non-violent Anti-Nephi-Lehies live, they would have been surrounded by the people whose king they had come to kill. If the Lamanites killed the converted king, and the Anti-Nephi-Lehies decided to avenge him, the Lamanites would have had a hard time getting out of that city alive.

It was clear that the attacking Lamanites couldn't simply walk past the Anti-Nephi-Lehies on their way to kill their king, but they couldn't just kill them either. Killing the unresponsive Anti-Nephi-Lehies was having a devastating effect on the Lamanites' morale. Killing someone in a battle is one thing; killing someone who;s just kneeling there is something else entirely, and it wasn't something that many of the Lamanites seemed prepared to do. Before long, over a thousand off the Lamanites decided that they couldn't bring themselves to kill any more Anti-Nephi-Lehies, and they actually knelt down and joined them.

This was a cause of serious introspection among the Lamanites. Many of them began to question what was really going on here. A few of them may have concluded that this was exactly what the Nephites wanted. The Nephites and the Lamanites had been enemies for as long as any of them could remember. Perhaps this was some kind of Nephite trick, to get the Lamanites to give up fighting, or to fight amongst themselves. Either by getting the Lamanites to bury their weapons, or by getting themselves to kill each other off, the Nephites were seriously weakening the Lamanite armies, and that was a problem that the Lamanites needed to solve. Since the Lamanites couldn't replace their indoctrinated king without also killing off other corrupted Lamanites or allowing themselves to get surrounded, they abandoned that plan and instead went directly against the Nephites, who were the source of this confusion.

After a series of conventional battles, the Lamanites discovered that they couldn't destroy the Nephites at this time, so they returned to their own lands, which makes a lot of sense. Yes, it's usually best to solve problems at their source, but you also have to be practical about what you can accomplish. Sometimes, you can't truly solve a problem, and you just have to learn how to deal with it instead. Several people who have lived with long-term illnesses have learned that. If you can't cure the condition outright, you can at least treat the symptoms, which is exactly what the Lamanites did.

The Lamanites probably saw the Anti-Nephi-Lehies as a kind of cancer. They weren't truly Lamanites anymore; they had been corrupted by the Nephites, and it seemed that they were going to go on, converting more and more Lamanites to the Nephite religion. They had to be stopped, and fast - before the cancer spread out of control. Going to war against their former bretheren was a drastic decision, but like amputating a limb, they considered it necessary to save the rest of their kingdom, so they began again to destroy the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi.

This time, the Anti-Nephi-Lehies eventually retreated and joined the Nephites, and if I were a Lamanite, I think I would have been almost glad for that. Sure, the Nephites had managed to get a bunch of Lamanites to switch sides, increasing the strength of the Nephite forces while decreasing the strength of the Lamanites, but at least the Lamanites who had been converted were now out of Lamanite territory. The Lamanites established a new king, and could have simply secured their borders with a resolve to kill any Nephite who entered their lands, even if they supposedly came in peace.

But instead of shoring up their defences against any future invasions, the Lamanites again went to war against the Nephites. I'm not sure what the Lamanites were thinking when they did this. The Nephites had already defeated them just a few chapters ago, and now they had succeeded in getting a number of former Lamanites to join them. The Lamanites were terribly outmatched here, and they should have known that. Maybe, in this case, they really were just angry. Before this, most of their attacks made at least a little bit of sense. They found that some of their people had been corrupted by their enemies, so they tried to remove the corruption and strike back at those who had caused it. Now, with the converted portion of their forces now becoming one with the Nephites, maybe the Lamanites just wanted to get back at the Nephites for what they had done. While it may not have been the most strategically logical thing they could have done, it does make some sense, when you consider human nature. The Nephites had just pulled off a successful scheme against the Lamanites, despite everything the Lamanites had tried to do to stop it. Of course the Lamanites would feel insulted an upset. Of course they would get angry and want revenge. It may not have been very smart for the Lamanites to attack the Nephites at that time, but I can certainly see why they would want to.

So, some sense can be made out of the Lamanites' actions in Alma 24-28. This may not have been what they were actually thinking, if they were actually thinking at all, but it might explain some of the thoughts and emotions that were going through the Lamanites' heads while the Nephites were converting many Lamanites into Nephites. I'm not sure that, if I were in their shoes, I would have acted the same way they did, but I'm sure that I would have been thinking and feeling some of the same things they were. Maybe their actions don't make a whole lot of sense to us, but if we really think about it, they do seem to make some sense, and they certainly made sense to the Lamanites at the time.

I'm not sure what all we can learn from considering the Lamanite's perspective, but in real life, it's certainly a good practice to consider what other people are thinking and feeling, even if they're working against us. We're all human. We're all brothers and sisters. We all have hearts and minds, and while we don't always think and feel the same way, we all occasionally have the same kinds of thoughts and emotions. If we think about what other people think and feel, we can interact with them more wisely and compassionately than if we consider them inhuman "others." It's easy to think of the Lamanites as war-loving barbarians, but they were people, too. They had thoughts and feelings that were just as human as ours are or as the Nephites were, and if the Nephites had considered things from the Lamanites' perspective more often, they might have painted them in a better light in their records.